Yamaha, Finale, And Mac Osx Leopard - Idiot Guide?, Never installed midi before on OSX, need guidance Options

[jmcm]

Essentials:
System - Mac OS X Leopard OR Tiger (or have older machines running Panther);
Typesetting software - Finale;
Midi device - Yamaha PortableGrand NP-30

I typeset for years on OS9 with Finale, and an old Roland plugged into my Mac via the serial connection, but after a couple of years doing no typesetting I am restarting, and had to pension off the old OS9 machine and Roland and upgrade Finale to run on my OSX machines. With the OS9 machine I just plugged in the Roland and it worked (with a bit of fiddling in Finale), but that approach isn't working with OSX. I have very little idea even where to start to get this working, so I'm looking for someone who could walk me through the steps as a complete beginner in installing a midi device to work with my Mac. Sorry.

(I did do a search of the threads to see if this had already been gone over, but couldn't find anything. If you can point me to a relevant thread I can go through that to see if I can get my devices working.)

What I've done:
I've installed the Yamaha USB Midi driver 1.1.0 and the update 1.1.1 - I can't find a newer one by searching with google. This appears in my System prefs, but when I start it up it tells me there is no USB midi device attached (oh yes there is). I've checked the cables, restarted, tried switching the plugs on my midi cable around and I'm getting lights on the cable, so something is working. I've also gone through the well-documented steps in Finale to try and reach the midi device that way, but failed as it's obviously not communicating with the system. I also started up Garage Band to see if it might find the keyboard for me, but it didn't.

The obvious possibilities are a) the Yamaha model I have is never going to talk to a Mac and I should have bought something more expensive; b) Leopard (which has issues with just about every software) has issues with 3rd party midi drivers, and I should try this on Tiger (which means a tedious reinstall, but I'll do it if I have to) or panther. On the other hand I may just have no idea what I'm doing and there's something completely obvious (to someone in the know) that I have missed.

I'm hoping someone has some experience that would save me a lot of time fiddling around and getting frustrated, and wouldn't mind helping me out. I'm not new to Macs, so am reasonably competent, but unfortunately it seems I'm a total deadhead with midi.

[philflood]

There are a whole bunch of connectivity issues with USB and Leopard. I hate to say it, buts its almost as bad as the whole XP to VISTA changeover. Unless the driver was written for Leopard, you are not likely to get it to work. I would suspect that you would have no issues with Tiger, although there are occasional issues that pop-up when a driver was not designed for an Intel system. Personally, I would go through the trouble of the tedious Tiger reinstall, and hold off on upgrading to Leopard until such time as you know drivers are available for all of you essential hardware devices.